How To: Make A Cellphone Charger Box

Organizing the chargers for your cellphone, PDA, Nintendo DS, etc. can be hugely annoying and expensive. Why expensive? When you leave chargers plugged into the wall, they’re still drawing electricity—even when your phone isn’t plugged in.

Oh, no! What to do? Instructables has a good solution: Use an IKEA storage box to house a power strip with all of your chargers plugged into it. The person who wrote the Instructable installed a switch on the outside of the box, but you don’t need to go to that extreme to make use of this idea. Just unplug the strip when you’re done, and all your electricity vampires will be out of business. —MEGHANN MARCO

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The whole electricity vampire thing is mostly a myth. I bought one of those Kill-a-watt meters and guess how much my phone charger uses when not charging…. 0 watts. Cable box pulls some wattage, but at the end of the month, it isn’t much.

One thing I’d be worried about with this Ikea box trick is depending on the number of chargers you have in there, it’s going to get hot pretty quick. Usually you don’t want to put a bunch of electronic equipment in a sealed box with no ventilation.

Bradley’s link has one problem:
“But already we can make some interesting deductions. My measurements indicate that my phone chargers consume less than 0.5W when left plugged in. The total power consumption of the average Brit is 5000W.”

5000 Watts per what?! Watts is a rate, not an amount. You’re billed in kilowatt/hr, not watts per nothing. Either the person who made the web page doesn’t know what they’re doing, or they made a typo.

I just did my own experiment with a similar meter to what he’s using… Just the adapter plugged in, no device attached (unless noted in parens):

Actually, you are quite wrong. You are not billed for W/h. You are billed for Wh. There’s a big difference. A Watt is equal to one Joule per second, so it is indeed a rate. However, your assumption that a Watt by itself means nothing is wrong. Something that uses 50W is using 50 J/s. Multiply by seconds and you get the total number of Joules.

@asherchang: I’m guessing it’s lost to the heat the the transformer produces.

But this box seems counter-intuitive. Not only is there the heat build up issue, but instead of just plugging in a charger when you want to use it, you’re effectively plugging in a lot of chargers, just to use one.